Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to start driving traffic is publish great content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this article, we look at the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that new traffic will automatically start flowing when you post content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With competition becoming increasingly more difficult businesses are researching any opportunity they can to get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage. For businesses, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their website is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to explain the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let me illustrate this point with a story.
Knowing Where To Tap
All was going just fine in the widget-making plant when suddenly, production stopped.
As no one could figure out what was wrong, the manager decided to call in an expert.
The expert arrived shortly afterward and headed out directly to the control box. After staring at the schematics for what seemed like about 5 minutes or less, the expert then took out a tiny little hammer and made a gentle tap about one cm from the bottom-left corner of the unit.
Immediately, all machines inside the assembly line returned to normal.
The manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received a bill for $5,000.
The manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the widget plant stand to lose when the machines stopped functioning and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for years spent developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your blog configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
While the solution to many challenges often seems ridiculously easy in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to figure things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services you need to set up to get certain outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure in order to ensure that everything will function as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a piece of software, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage is a process that involves your web server, your website or blog, and a number of third-party sites and/or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we were to create a simplified diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps.
Your Server – Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your site can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like integrating spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and/or online services.
Integration With External Web Properties
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all of your content is posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it gets syndicated automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your configuration, content pointing back to your site will be automatically posted to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and site will be given additional exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with useful information, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
Once your Google Webmasters account is set up, you can use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic results, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site details, visitor tracking information can be integrated with WordPress via a Google Analytics plugin used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, you can use the details to integrate and automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social accounts before you can integrate these with your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and profiles set up with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can You can post your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we cover some of these tools in greater detail in the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging web platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are various platforms that can be incorporated into your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading Settings
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify various update services whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion Settings
Although discussion settings are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to sites linked to from your posts, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s post permalinks …
(Configuring permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using WP permalinks here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress Plugin Settings – Configuration
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you cannot ignore the importance of securing your site.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
For more information, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugins For SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find, crawl and index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with their friends and members of their social networks can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social sharing plugins allow you to specify which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Settings – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, some themes also provide built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your website complies with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress site here:
WordPress Tags & Categories
Categories and tags help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which improves traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stages.
When configuring your web site to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal results.
Add A Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find more of your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide readers with a logical map of how your content is structured, whereas XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search bots can understand. Although search engines like Google can index your site just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your 404 Page Not Found
When online users type in the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they are presented with an error page (known as a 404 page) …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up on your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do is add new content consistently to automatically begin bringing new web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise required to perform this process typically takes some web developers months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven web marketing strategies.
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